


Sunflowers

by headfirstfrhalos



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Body Horror, Disfigurement, Gen, M/M, Nuclear Winter, inspired by a dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 02:56:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5989609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/headfirstfrhalos/pseuds/headfirstfrhalos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ugly bodies in the sun. Together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunflowers

**Author's Note:**

> based off a strange dream/nightmare i once had when i was young. it's not entirely scientifically accurate because it was a dream and i'm too tired to do research anyways. forgive me.

Inhabitable. Barren. The sandy wind clawed off any exposed skin, and the raging sun would shrivel up whatever was left. The air was thin and dusty. Craters the size of oceans sat between home, between hope, impassible, still smoking even after two years since their birth. If you peered over the edge of one, you'd see the twisted, blackened monuments to what was. Nothing could live in them. Not that the rest of the planet was any more hospitable.  

But by some miracle, some impossible chance, they were still alive. They managed to be safely tucked away in the depths of the earth when the world exploded to a halt. Their shelter had been built on the whim of a kind billionaire, and they had been in his house for some party celebrating a deal made by their record label. A party. A record label. Things like that were now unimaginable in this universe. He remembered waving away a flute of champagne that had been offered to him (he didn't drink) by an exhausted waiter when the ground shook like the earth was a coffin and the corpse was banging on the lid from within. A flash of light followed, and then the fanciful windows all shattered, a hot, blistering wind blowing in. Everyone was silent, and then suddenly burst into a panic, the host desperately trying to herd the throng downstairs as a glowing mushroom cloud bloomed in the distant dark, its deadly spores headed their way. 

His suit melted onto his skin. His ears rang and his vision swam, and he was vaguely aware of screaming in the far distance. Thoughtlessly, he glanced at his arm and saw that his skin was bubbling and had fused with the polyester. The three stripes that had once been his tattoo peeking from under the fabric were gone. He bent his fingers, and the skin crackled. 

"Move, move, move!"

He was pushed forward by a stranger, and he followed her into oblivion, past lavish paintings and tapestries hung on the walls and over marble tile, under gilded ceilings. The strangers around him were melting too, the sound of newly-hardened skin being torn to shreds by the muscle twisting mercilessly beneath. It was audible under the moans of pain and the clacking of shoes against the floor. 

He found the shock of red hair during the journey down the stairs, and he reached desperately for him, his best friend's entire body turning to face him and he could see the fear melt off his face like the paint off the walls, like the skin off of bones. He turned again and he saw that the hair on the left side of his head was charcoal and his ear was gone. He was sure the rest of him was in similar condition, though about a thousand people were standing in his way.  

Tyler gripped his hand tighter than he had ever held anything, and they made it into the miles-deep shelter together.

Whimpers of fear. The group, about seventy strong, stole and fouled up the already-stale air in the basement. Emergency lamps slowly flickered on. Faces, people, became recognizable, became hands for holding. Another explosion rocked the mansion and the whimpers started again. Some people collapsed against the wall and cried for water. Healthier victims tore clothes off of burnt friends, ignoring their pleas for air and water and kissing foreheads, too-salty tears landing in too-raw wounds and wolfing into the dazed murmuring with tortured wails. 

"Josh. Josh."

"Tyler. Tyler."

That was all they could do. Cling to one another and squeeze hands and whisper each other's names in the orange light as they stared straight ahead, definitely irradiated, definitely in shock. 

Two hands, trembling and burnt, entwined, and the night never ended.

* * *

They woke up. Josh had roused him, trying to let go of Tyler's hand because they had held each other so tight it left bruises. There was more light in the room, now that more lamps had been activated as the night wore on. Neither of them were sure whether it was morning or not. It probably wasn't. More than half the guests had perished overnight. They were beginning to bloat, some blue and purple, others red and shiny. At least there were no flies.

Tyler didn't want to see this. He looked at Josh instead. His left eye had shriveled and died in its socket. Tears were welling up in the right.

"Josh."

His throat felt the way his arm looked.

"Tyler."

The tight, damaged skin on Josh's face rippled and wrinkled and bent as his mouth moved to say his name. Tyler reached over to stroke his hair. It was the only sacred thing right now.

All that he touched broke off like the thinnest icicles. He stared at the hair in dismay.

"Tyler," he said again.

"Sorry."

"No."

"No," he agreed.

A beat of silence.

"Water?"

"Water."

It took all his strength to stand. Even backed against the wall the way they were, they struggled and choked and it was years before they managed to put any weight on their feet. They stepped over bodies, dead and alive (the only way to tell the difference was if they cried out when they were trod upon). 

Rations were in the back. A few had managed to get to them before perishing, red, wrinkled hands still clutching freeze-dried packets of fruit and cans of soup. Small puddles of water had spilled on the ground where opened bottles had been dropped in scuffles and deaths. Dead flesh soaked in it, staining the water red and brown. They stepped in the puddles to try and get fresher water, packages of water sitting primly on steel shelves. Their hands cracked and bled when they tried to open them.

Tyler's tongue was clacking against the roof of his mouth.

"Water," they said in near unison.

They lapped up the red water together.

* * *

"Goodbye."

They were talking to the corpses. They could not breathe down here. The explosions had stopped, and it was better to starve to death outside than to starve to death inside. The bodies were beginning to smell. They could not bear to see their siblings rot. 

They carried as much as they could. Pried rations from stiff hands, their broken fingers unwilling to let go, begging them to stay down here in the dank, stale air in the orange lights with their ghosts. No. They wanted to see the sky. 

There were three flights of stairs. They were winded by the first set. They sat down and ate dried plums. He could not taste anything. 

The second flight of stairs were the same. They opened the first aid kit and dressed each other's wounds. It didn't help at all, but at least they could no longer see their red, hellish skin.

The air was fresher halfway up the third flight. They eyed their water bottles, tempted, but looked at each other and said,

"No."

They would save that for later. 

The light was blinding. There was almost none through the thick gray of the sky, but they still squinted. Ash rained from the sky like confetti. Josh reached out to touch a speck. It turned into a fine powder on his finger. He rubbed it between his index finger and his thumb and released it to the wind. Tyler stared at Josh. This was the first clear look he's had at him since yesterday. His whole left side was crippled. Even wrapped in bandages, he could tell. He looked at his hand. His pinky and his ring finger were both damaged beyond repair. The pinky was entirely gone. The ring finger was holding on by a thread, and wobbled with every slight movement he made. It hung from the white-bandaged (slowly being stained pus-yellow) stump that hung dead at his side. He knew it didn't hurt. Tyler saw his own body, his flesh burned down to the bone when Josh wrapped it with reverence, so dry he was sure it would never rot, never become infected. At least Josh's tattoo was still intact. 

They looked around the mansion together. Not much was left. Wilted framework, heaps of burnt rubble, most of it was obliterated. Half of the east wall still stood. They hobbled to it together and dumped it on the ground against it. It would be safe there.

"Sleep?" Josh asked.

It would be even more safe if they stayed beside it at all times. 

"Sleep," Tyler confirmed.

It took another few years to situate themselves. Both were lying on their sides, facing each other, damaged sides up. They had no blankets, the outside was freezing, and the sky was raining radioactive ash and burying them. Tyler was reminded of snow. 

He dreamed of white wintertime.

* * *

For two weeks, they hardly moved. They could not, they did not want to. They watched the smoke rise in the distance. At least they had a clear view, with everything in the way destroyed. The first bomb had dropped maybe three miles away, the other maybe six. They ate, they drank, they fiddled mindlessly with their bandages and watched their wounds heal. They redressed each other and when they weren't staring at the smoke or eating dried meat and fruit, they were staring at each other. Josh brought a thumb to Tyler's blistered lips and his breath hitched with fear when the skin slid off. It bled. Tyler gently grasped his bloodied hand and held his thumb, turning it slightly in the light to see how his blood glistened on it. He watched Josh with sad eyes and brought it to his mouth, shriveled tongue cleaning the blood off. 

"Kiss?" Josh pleaded.

_Was that how they must kiss now?_

Tyler nodded.

"Kiss."

Josh reached for Tyler's hand and brought it gently to his mouth. Tyler's fingers, dulled to the senses as they had become, still felt the detail of his mouth, the red roughness of the left, the soft pinkness of the right. He was split perfectly down the middle.

Tyler's hands strayed from Josh's lips to his hair. It was faded and dry. Josh's eyes glimmered with sadness.

"Why?" he asked. 

"No," he answered, carding his hands through it and listening to the tiny  _snapsnapsnap_ of strands of hair breaking off. He made it all the way down to the back of his head, and there he twisted his fingers, the hair dropping off and clinging to the fabric of his shirt. It was all gone. 

"Good," Tyler whispered.

Josh made several aborted gestures at his head. His only working eye tried to stare at the top of his skull. He finally touched it, and sighed. The tiniest hint of a smile wiggled from his lips.

"Good."

* * *

The sun came out after a month. This was when the sandstorms began, when the sun started burning. They could only rest in the shade of the wall for so long. They had enough rations, enough water, but now, not enough shelter. Their melted clothes would not do. They would have to go back inside. They slept in the stairwell, not wanting to think of the bodies down below. The stench was unbearable even from here.

Movement was easier. Their skin learned how to stretch again, just a little bit, and they no longer bled. He was sure that was because they had lost all their blood. He was sure they weren't human anymore. 

His ring finger was gone. The black band of metal he had worn on it had heated up in the blast and burned it and it fell off last week. He wasn't too worried. He had more fingers, nine to be exact. He thought of a pair of blue eyes. He wept. He didn't have nine of those. 

"Josh," he said, reaching for his turned shoulder.

His voice was more ruined than usual. 

"Tyler?"

Josh turned to look at him. The now-hairless places where his eyebrows once rested raised in curiosity. Tyler held the ring up to him.

"Miss'er," he said before breaking into sobs.

Josh held his hand out beneath Tyler's, the one with the black fingernails and missing digits. Tyler dropped the ring into his waiting palm. Josh took his other hand and inspected it. Tears rolled down Tyler's chapped face and he swallowed them for moisture. 

Josh reached for Tyler's hand, the right one. Carefully, he slipped it onto his ring finger. It fit.

"New," he said.

His hands lingered on Tyler's as he looked at him earnestly. Tyler stopped his tears and looked at him too. The weak voice. The half-melted face. The missing eye and ear, missing fingers, missing hair. Missing muscle and fat, missing everything. He was a ghastly, skeletal shadow of himself, and his heart swelled at the sight of him. It always had, and it always will. 

"Yes."

Josh laughed, a cracking honk that sounded nothing like his old one but looked the same because of his tongue, the one that used to be pink. It pressed against his broken teeth and poked out the tiniest bit, and Tyler kissed it. Yes, he kissed him, old-style, one where lips meet lips because the skin wasn't so fragile and their resilience could be taken for granted. 

He didn't have any more blue eyes. But he had one brown one. 

* * *

They grew sunflowers. Josh remembered that they were the only plant in the world that actively absorbed radioactive material. They found a few packets of their seeds down in the bunker when they went for more supplies for the first time in two months (their brothers and sisters had finally finished rotting), along with blankets and tents and a few other things they had overlooked. That was a good day.

They built their shelter from old metal beams and heatproof blankets. Tyler liked to pretend that it was a blanket fort like the ones from his childhood. He wondered if seven year old him would be afraid of what he became now. His limp, his twisted frame, ruined voice and shriveled skin, yes, sometimes he wondered if he was actually someone else. But never mind. 

The garden was slow going. The sunflowers couldn't grow fast enough. On especially sweltering days (every day), they sat together beneath the increasingly-taller plants and rested. The soil was slowly turning brown again, back from the deadly gray-black it once was, a small ten-by-twelve plot of soil. That was the world. Not the smoking craters, or the skeletons deep below. Not the sandstorms that they wrapped themselves with canvas and each other to protect against. Not the sun, not the hunger or thirst, or the broken bodies that they knew would die far sooner than they had planned. It was the color brown. Living soil, Josh's single eye, Tyler's tanned skin, brown, brown, brown, brown. Brown was rot, but rot meant there was life. They die, but they live. 

Summer in all its heat could not kill the flowers, and they bloomed with two heads, triple stalks- mutants, but they bloomed. They made seeds. They spent a long fall day shaking them from the dried heads and collecting them in a small bag. They tilled the soil around the first plot with their hands, ignoring the screaming of their brittle fingers as they pushed each seed gently into the ground. It's not like they were on a tight schedule. 

The enormous cache of dried rations was enough to last a lifetime. But nothing tastes better than what they had created themselves. They had managed to grow a few pathetic heads of cabbage once the sunflowers had done their job and it was the best thing they had ever tasted. They were tempted to throw out their rations because the cabbage was  _theirs._  The garden grew and grew.

A hundred-twenty square feet today, and the rest of the planet tomorrow.

* * *

They lay together, lost somewhere in their enormous garden. 

"Josh."

"Tyler."

One syllable, two syllables. So easy on the tongue. The skin on their cheeks had sagged to fit the movements of their mouth to form those words, and those words only. Painless words.

"Josh."

"Tyler."

Damaged hands caressed damaged faces.

"Beautiful," Tyler gasped.

That word was hard to say with a blackened tongue. It was painful to say and painful to hear, it was a word that belonged to another world. 

"Beautiful," Josh sighed.

It was their favorite word nonetheless. 

Two hands, seven fingers between them, entwined, and the sun stalked into the dust. 

**Author's Note:**

> i don't really know what this is.


End file.
